In Tune with Nature

Napoleon called England a nation of shopkeepers: given the demise of the British high street, it would be more appropriate today to call it a nation of gardeners. The bicentenary of the Royal Horticultural Society (rhs) this year has spawned a green-fingered fever across a country where gardening is already a national pastime; where more than 15% of the population has a conservatory; where television gardeners are national heart-throbs; and where almost everyone has an opinion on rhododendrons.

"We believe that growing plants makes people's lives better," says Andrew Colquhoun, chief executive of the rhs, a charity that runs gardens and education centres across Britain, and is organising a profusion of celebrations for its 200th birthday. Since 1804, the group has ballooned from a handful of botanists who pooled their resources and sent plant collectors across the empire in search of specimens (one of the founders, Joseph Banks, travelled with Captain Cook on the Endeavour), to one of the largest subscription associations in the country. In the past 20 years, membership has grown from 70,000 to 345,000.

The boom is confirmed by a visit to last week’s sell – out Chelsea Flower Show, a hardy perennial where the show’s gardens elicit strong opinions. “It looks hideous – like Tenerife”, sniffs one passer – by at a gold – medal – winning garden. Another enthusiast from Scotland is hoping to buy a prized oriental poppy from a grower. “It’s so sexy, I just can’t stop thinking about it”, he confesses. Carol Klein, a Chelsea veteran whose medal - winning garden designed in waves of colour was applauded by the Financial Times, says gardens are” the only opportunity for most people to create something that is theirs and put their hands in the earth. It’s one of the most fundamental human experiences”.

A short walk along the Thames, at Tate Britain, a exhibition entitled “Art of the Garden” opened on June 3^rd and runs until August 30^thto coincide with the RHS bicentenary. In its first room hangs a Turner view of an Italianate garden looking out to the continent from the Isle of Wight. Facing it are two of Constable’s most cherished paintings: his views of his father’s vegetable garden and his mother’s flower garden, on the family’s Suffolk farm. One view is outward, exploratory and international; the other inward, reflective and intensely national. In their different ways, both artists encompassed ideas about the art of the garden in Britain.

“This show is about how gardens have been embedded in the British consciousness over the past 200 years”, says Martin Postle, its co-curator. Mr Postle, himself a passionate gardener, is interested in how gardening fits into the social history of Britain. The show features many works by artists who are now unfashionable, or indeed forgotten, from Helen Allingham`s water – colours of the cottage gardens created by the legendary garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, to Miss Jekyll`s own copies of Turner, whose palette inspired her planting.

Why are the British so potty about planting? Some answers can be found in "A Little History of British Gardening", by Jenny Uglow. Published in America this month, this addictive book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only British gardening but also British culture. Ms Uglow links Britons' gardening obsession to several causes, but predominantly to the smallness of the island. "Because of the scarcityof land, the gradual enfranchisement of people and their social improvement had always been seen in terms of land. When you own a stake in the land—however small—your status and self-expression is bound up in that."

Ms Uglow also talks about gardening as an expression of Britishness. In 1707 the Act of Union with Scotland made Great Britain a single nation. The Spectator,the most important gardening magazine of the time, advocated a particular British taste as distinct from the French and Dutch gardens that had influenced the previous century. Whereas continental gardens looked down on nature from above, from a terrace or a balustrade, and controlled nature with enclosed gardens, topiary and canals, the British garden became about moving through nature, about experiencing it rather than just looking at it.

Walking through a garden circuit, such as the great landscapes of Stourhead or Stowe, became like walking through a series of classical landscape paintings by Poussin and Claude. Such gardens, planted by the aristocracy, were designed to demonstrate British informality as opposed to continental artifice. They were meant to display the culture of their owners, influenced by Addison's advice: "Make a landscape of your possessions."

Today, the enthusiasm for gardening encompasses every sector of society. In cities such as Birmingham, so-called Coriander Clubs have sprung up, where Asian women plant their native herbs and spices on disused land and African nurseries grow exotic tropical plants that were once unseen on British shores. Ms Uglow chuckles at a man in Norwich who blankets his banana plants in bubble wrap each winter to guard against the cold-he is not so different from the pineapple pioneers of the 17th century.

There is still snobbery, with people being judged by the contents of their trolley at garden centres. But gardening now, as in Shakespeare's time, is a language that everyone in Britain understands. It will change with fashion and technology, concludes Ms Uglow, but in important ways it will remain the same: "We may think that we are tending our garden, but of course, in many different ways, it is the garden and the plants that are nurturingus."

(The Source: adapted from www.economist.com/node/2724295 )

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